Editor's note: The following is an excerpt from “The Wives” by Simone Gorrindo.
“Sometimes I think about joining the military.”
That was what Andrew said to me one evening in the winter of 2007, when he was twenty‑four and I was twenty‑three. We'd just moved in together and were out walking in Annapolis, the colonial Maryland capital where Andrew was studying the classics at a small liberal arts college.
“I would leave you,” I said, without thinking. The air was cold enough that I could see my breath.
Andrew's face went still.
“Join the Army? You would never want to do that,” I continued uneasily. The Global War on Terror had been going on for six years already. We were in the midst of the Iraq surge, the deadliest year for US forces since 2004. I had moved to New York for college just two weeks before the Twin Towers fell. By the time I graduated four years later, it was hard to imagine not being at war. But it wasn't my war. Everyone I knew was against the invasion of Iraq, which seemed, in every sense, like a costly conflict with no clear rationale, and I had marched with friends in protest of it. Afterward, we'd gotten drinks at an East Village bar. That had been the extent of my involvement. It wasn't like my generation was being drafted. US soldiers fighting this, I thought, must either be true believers, from military families, or out of options. Andrew was none of those things.
He always had an answer or an argument….
